President Forever (2004)

hard at the beginning of the game, and you'll have little room to maneuver financially in the home stretch; push your candidate too hard, and he may become tired and make a debilitating gaffe during a rally or a policy speech.

The game's interface – a map of the U.S. with "red" Republican and "blue" Democrat states highlighted based on current voter opinion, and a set of menus allowing you to spend your alloted points each day/turn – is simple enough to learn in a few minutes, but deep enough to allow endless tweaking. For example, a "platform" menu allows players to position their candidate as right-wing, center-right, centrist, center-left or left-wing on 18 different issues ranging from affirmative action, business taxes and free trade to terrorism, military intervention and same-sex marriage. Changing positions has the potential to alter your candidate's standing for better or worse in specific regions or states, but altering a position too significantly can generate negative press.

You can also spend your turn points on researching any of these issues, which can help give your policy speeches or advertisements a leg up on the competition. Throughout the game, the press has an unpredictable effect on which issues will become important during the race. If a story comes out about a spike in illegal immigration or renewable energy, for example, voter interest in the issue will increase, and will have a positive or negative impact on your campaign based on your platform position. Similarly, political action committees will randomly run ads for or against your campaign in specific states based on your positions, which will hurt or improve your momentum in those states.

The game may have benefited from the addition of a couple of other variables. Record voter turnout during the early Democratic primary contests indicates that many Democrats are chomping at the bit to vote against Bush in this election. As such, it seems like Kerry should have an edge over Bush in raising the game's foot soldiers, who give candidates a "get out the vote" bonus in states where they are raised and deployed. This could be offset by a Republican Party edge on fundraising.

Also, while political campaigns generally force candidates to move toward the center on certain issues, the default settings for several of Bush and Kerry's platform positions seemed almost too skewed toward the center. For example, few on either side of the political spectrum would disagree that President Bush's tax policy is heavily influenced by the right-wing theory of "trickle down" economics, where giving tax breaks to corporations and wealthy investors is thought to help stimulate the economy at large, ultimately providing more job opportunities for middle and lower class citizens. Also, President Bush has had to approach Congress several times already to seek significant additional funds for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet he begins the game positioned as center or center-right on tax policy issues and military spending.

Similarly, Kerry is positioned as a centrist on public health care -- an issue where he is more left leaning -- and as an advocate for completely unrestricted abortions -- an issue where his position is more accurately center-left. Oddly, if you tweak several of these platform issues at the beginning of the game to more accurately reflect each candidate's historical record, their support initially plummets in most states.

These are relatively minor issues, though. Overall, the game does a really impressive job of emulating the many factors that come into play during a Presidential election, downloadable from the Internet at $12, its hard to go wrong if you like simulation games and are at all interested in the outcome of this race.

By the way, if your name is Ralph Nader and you happen to be a fan of Armchair Empire, please bow out now – you're making it friggin' impossible for me to win this thing.

- M. Enis

(June 17, 2004)